Professor Stefan Thomke discusses how past experience and intuition can be misleading when attempting to launch an innovative new product, service, business model, or process. Instead, Booking.com and other innovative firms embrace a culture where testing, experimentation, and even failure are tried and true.
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Government spending on bridges, roads, and other infrastructure pieces does not always ignite economic good times, say William Kerr and Ramana Nanda. The key question: Are financiers nearby?
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After a lengthy courting process, Amazon thought its plan for a New York HQ campus was in the bag. But the company failed a primary goal of negotiations, says James Sebenius.
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When governments take on a smart city project, it's often the private sector that's left to execute the vision—sometimes at the expense of good public policy. John Macomber proposes a roadmap that considers situation, solution, and sovereignty.
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As long as we’re talking about a trillion-dollar government-industry initiative on infrastructure, why not invest in humans as well as bridges? asks James Heskett. What do YOU think?
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In spite of the recent surge in e-commerce, brick-and-mortar retail, specifically in the form of large-scale shopping malls, is still the dominant venue for consumer purchases in the developed world. The construction of mass-scale shopping malls has also experienced tremendous growth in newly industrialized countries such as China. This research provides a rigorous, yet practical, framework to understand and evaluate why retail stores join a shopping mall and how their decisions affect mall revenue. The model can be extended and applied to a number of settings where a decision maker must choose among alternative sites to construct a market, for example, for transportation hubs such as airports or train stations.

It is time for Congress to recommit itself to drafting legislation that will transform housing finance for the twenty-first century, write Nicolas P. Retsinas and Rob Couch.
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One of the strongest findings in studies of entrepreneurship is the clear positive correlation between personal wealth and the propensity to engage in entrepreneurship. One study, for example, has shown that entrepreneurs comprise just under 9 percent of households in the United States, but hold about 40 percent of total net worth. The most common explanation for this correlation is that credit constraints pose an important barrier to entry for less wealthy individuals. However, others have questioned the degree to which financing constraints are barriers to entrepreneurship, particularly in advanced economies where firms have adequate access to capital. In this paper, the authors consider a unique mortgage reform in Denmark to study how increasing access to credit through the unlocking of housing collateral for personal loans had an impact on entrepreneurship. Findings show that the reform affected the ability to draw on debt backed by home equity. However, despite the positive and statistically significant effect of relaxing credit constraints on entrepreneurship, the magnitudes are small. Furthermore, an important reason for the small magnitude was that the marginal business founded by those who benefited from the reform was of lower quality, where the new entrants failed within two years of entry. Overall, the results paint a more nuanced picture of the extent to which financing constraints are important in settings with well-developed credit markets, and the role that home equity can play in alleviating these. Key concepts include: Findings address the longstanding question of the importance of credit constraints for entrepreneurship. Housing collateral shifts the bank's adjudication decision from a specific project to the creditworthiness of the borrower. On the one hand, good entrepreneurial projects may be able to be started or sustained. On the other hand, though, optimistic entrepreneurs may start lower quality businesses because they do not face the same discipline from the bank.
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To build trust and facilitate transactions, online marketplaces present information not only about products, but also about the people offering the products. Many platforms now allow sellers to present personal profiles, post pictures of themselves, and even link to their Facebook accounts. While these features serve the laudable goals of building trust and accountability, they can also bring unintended consequences: Personal profiles may facilitate discrimination. Benjamin G. Edelman and Michael Luca investigate the extent of racial discrimination against hosts on the popular online rental marketplace Airbnb.com. They construct a data set combining pictures of all New York City landlords on Airbnb with their rental prices and information about characteristics and quality of their properties. The authors use this data to measure differences in outcomes according to host race. Nonblack hosts are able to charge approximately 12 percent more than black hosts, holding location, rental characteristics, and quality constant. Moreover, black hosts receive a larger price penalty for having a poor location relative to nonblack hosts. These differences highlight the risk of discrimination in online marketplaces, suggesting an important unintended consequence of a seemingly-routine mechanism for building trust. Key concepts include: Online marketplaces have the potential to reduce discrimination by facilitating more arms-length transactions. However, social platforms such as Airbnb.com, a popular online marketplace for short-term rentals, may have the opposite effect. This paper investigates the differences in prices of properties from hosts of varying races. Non-black hosts charge approximately 12% more than black hosts for comparable properties. Online marketplaces should think carefully about whether, and why, the looks of buyers and sellers should be relevant to the purchase at hand. Airbnb might consider eliminating or reducing the prominence of host photos. It is not clear what beneficial information these photos provide, while they risk facilitating discrimination by guests.
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Is the US financial system in better shape today than it was five years ago? Finance professors Victoria Ivashina, David Scharfstein, and Arthur Segel see real progress—but also missed opportunities and more challenges.
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In this video report, Senior Lecturer John Macomber visits the Kumbh Mela in India to discover what such an undertaking can teach us about real estate, urbanization, sustainability, and infrastructure.
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Every 12 years, millions of Hindu pilgrims travel to the Indian city of Allahabad for the Kumbh Mela, the largest public gathering in the world. In this first-person account, Senior Lecturer John Macomber shares his first impressions and explains what he's doing there.
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At a recent conference in Herzliya, Israel, Nicolas P. Retsinas, John H. Vogel, and Charles S. Laven joined residential developers, non-profits, national and local government officials, and academics to brainstorm approaches to affordable rental housing.
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When a local government decides to pursue environmentally aware construction policies for its own buildings, the private sector follows suit, according to new research by Timothy Simcoe and Michael W. Toffel.
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As a burgeoning global population migrates to the world's urban centers, it's crucial to design livable cities that function with scarce natural resources. John Macomber discusses the critical connection between real estate financing and innovative design in the built environment.
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